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After that I started to learn tailoring, but it didn’t suit me. I liked exercise, and tailoring means you just sit there doing that back-and-forth thing with the needle. I visited the family next door quite often, where my mother’s brother-in-law, the shoemaker, lived. I got to like cobbling and wanted to be a shoemaker, but my father said no. He said there were no shoemakers in our family and I wasn’t going to be the first. So I gave it up. After that I did rounds with a door-to-door carpenter who put windows in. Some of the Poles and Germans were building houses and they needed someone to put in windows. But Father said that if I went around to those places I’d end up eating pork, so he said I couldn’t.
In the end I wound up working for some distant relatives – I don’t remember whether they were from Mother’s or Father’s side of the family. They had a concrete factory. Father arranged it all somehow with the oldest of them – Abram, his name was – and they took me on. That was in a village on the way to Chelm called Udalec, and there were two factories there: one Jew who made bricks, and these relatives of ours with the concrete factory. There were four of them: Abram, Motl, Acze and Pejrec. And their mother was still alive, and a daughter, their sister. I think her name was Jenta, but I don’t remember the mother’s. The concrete factory made sections of piping, pavement, slabs for bedding sewers, and roof tiles. I made roof tiles. It was all in one room – I had a machine for making the tiles, and the other stuff was cast in molds in the courtyard.
In the end I wound up working for some distant relatives – I don’t remember whether they were from Mother’s or Father’s side of the family. They had a concrete factory. Father arranged it all somehow with the oldest of them – Abram, his name was – and they took me on. That was in a village on the way to Chelm called Udalec, and there were two factories there: one Jew who made bricks, and these relatives of ours with the concrete factory. There were four of them: Abram, Motl, Acze and Pejrec. And their mother was still alive, and a daughter, their sister. I think her name was Jenta, but I don’t remember the mother’s. The concrete factory made sections of piping, pavement, slabs for bedding sewers, and roof tiles. I made roof tiles. It was all in one room – I had a machine for making the tiles, and the other stuff was cast in molds in the courtyard.
Period
Location
Poland
Interview
Michal Warzager